But not yet. Despite their violent first encounter, and Saphothere’s subsequent contemptuous treatment of him, Tack now felt he owed the traveller. This feeling was not due to programming, which was now such that his mission came before all else, but due to the way Saphothere’s treatment of and regard for Tack had slowly changed.
Taking up his carbine, Tack stood still and looked around. There was food in the two packs, and in the two others still strapped inside the mantisal, but it was necessary to save that for the latter stages of the journey when food would not be available. But Tack was also aware that when Saphothere awoke food would be his primary need. At a rough guess he supposed them to now be in the early Jurassic or late Triassic age, so there should be plenty of meat available at least. The only problem was that this available meat might well regard them in the same light, so Tack could not leave Saphothere’s side. Glancing up, he saw a flock of pterosaurs flapping over and considered taking a potshot at them, but they were very high and the chances of bringing one down close enough were remote. Refocusing, he saw that the tree above him contained fruit resembling mangoes. Accessing the huge body of knowledge Pedagogue had loaded into his mind, it took him some time to elicit that he was contemplating the outer glossy coats of a fruit much like the walnut. Propping the carbine by the tree, he jumped up to catch a low branch and hauled himself higher. Climbing with ease and speed, he pulled out his Heliothane carbide hunting knife to cut the fruit open and sample it. It was so unripe and bitter he spat it out, then tossed the fruit itself away. Where it thudded into the dust, the first of the three herrerasaurs emerging from the forest dipped its nightmare head for a sniff—before continuing to stalk towards Saphothere.
Tack just reacted, dropping ten metres straight down to land on the monster’s back. The spine gave way under him with a dull crack, one of the long hind limbs splaying out at an angle, but its tail still whipping from side to side. Tack’s boots slid down either side of its back ridge, and he hooked one arm under its chin and wrenched its head back, terrarium stink in his nostrils, then drew his knife across its throat, the hot blood gushing over his hand. He rolled away in time to see a second herrerasaur coming at him, its mouth open in a gushing hiss. He cut at it, sending it dancing backwards, and turned to see the last of the three stamp over its writhing companion to leap towards him. His knife angled in the wrong position, he instead caught the loose skin of its throat wattle in his other hand, and shoulder-rolled the monster, head down, into the other assailant. Both uninjured herrerasaurs went down in a dusty squirming tumble, then came up snapping at each other, but with almost telepathic consent turned on Tack again. He realized these two were just not going to stop. Any mammal might have given up by now, but these things represented ferocity honed down to its most basic elements. Snarling, their heads dipped only half a metre from the ground, they advanced. Almost regretfully Tack started to reach for the Heliothane handgun holstered at his hip.
Then the ground before him erupted in a blinding flash, throwing the closest monster back, blinking in confusion. A second then a third detonation followed, eventually causing the creatures to turn tail and run.
Leaning up against the tree, holding Tack’s carbine, Saphothere croaked, ‘Can’t… leave you for a second.’ With its snub barrel he indicated the dying herrerasaur—before sliding down the trunk and slumping back into unconsciousness.
Silleck hung exhausted in her vorpal connectware, watching the torbeast withdrawing into ancient past and lower orders of probability, just as she watched Vetross falling further and further down the slope.
Irretrievably dead.
Silleck had but a moment to contemplate that before she became aware of the tachyon signal coming in, using vorpal sensors positioned throughout the wormhole as stepping stones. It was a single private transmission for Engineer Goron, so the interface technician knew it could only be from Maxell—no one else had the pull to send messages this way. Momentarily shutting out exterior connections, she watched the engineer receive the communication then head away. Connecting back in again, she tracked him away from the control room and into the immediate future, where he summoned a mantisal and embarked along the wormhole and she wondered why he had been summoned to New London now.
It was over then. Goron’s departure signalled more than anything that there would be no further attacks from either Cowl or his beast for the present. Silleck considered disconnecting as she was so tired, but like many of her kind she was addicted to this near omniscience. Godlike she threw her awareness back to a vorpal sensor she had abandoned when the attack had begun, and tried to find what she had merely glimpsed. The sensor she turned a hundred-and-eight degrees into interspace, and there saw the Neanderthal hurtling along in the silver cage of his pseudo-mantisal.
The glassy cage surrounding him was uneven in its formation, and in the dark interspace it reminded Silleck of some vastly expanded translucent plankton travelling above a shifting, but dead, sea bottom. The man was braced inside it and though he could not possibly understand what he was doing, she could see that he was willing himself back into the real before his tor took him to the limit of suffocation. And it worked. Turning the sensor slowly back into phase with the real world, Silleck followed him out of that dark realm, between a brightly starlit sky and a sea turned silver by moonlight.
Silleck observed his panic, but his mantisal did not fade away and drop him into the moonlit sea—tors possessed enough of their own mind or instinct to try and keep their hosts alive during the bulk of the journey. Instead it slid sideways to where dense forest formed another sea, then drifted down to an apparently rocky shoreline. Then finally the cage began to fade as it approached the ground. The Neanderthal braced himself for a bone-jarring impact on rocky ground, but instead hit pliant mud and bounced, as the glass-like structure faded and passed through him into the ground. He rolled and came up onto his knees, pulling a bone club from his hide clothing, then he stood and looked around. When no danger was immediately apparent, he scuttled to a sandy space between edifices of the dried mud, curled himself up in the most protected niche he could find and was still. Silleck tracked ahead.
The sun had begun to peak around one of the monoliths of mud, and was warming the Neanderthal’s feet before he awoke, which he did as if someone had touched him with a hot iron. He stood and headed towards the forest. Twenty feet from the trees, he hesitated—perhaps having already had some nasty experiences in other forests. Silleck noted the colourful fan-shaped leaves of the trees and realized they must be early ginkgos. Expanding her vision, she saw that the man had arrived on an island and was lucky in that, for there seemed to be no big reptiliomorphs in evidence. Not that such a primitive needed a great deal of luck. Observing the stains on the club he held, Silleck surmised he would be more able to survive the trials of these past times than many others. Though, of course, like the girl he would be unlikely to survive all the way. Cowl wasn’t interested in his samples surviving.
Other stations similar to their own hung geostationary above the planet like barrage balloons, while white ceramic ships moved in constant transit between them and the installation built on the dark side of Mercury. That installation resembled a metallic mosaic imprinted on black, though occasionally blotted out under the shadows of passing storms, which in turn were lit up as if by interior flashbulbs, as those storms discharged their electric power.